Pants on Fire By Sean Conforti

I was sitting on the shitter the other day with my boxers around my knees, cell phone snugly resting in the crotch playing my Jurassic Park Builder app.  It was all going fine, I was fairly sure I was going to get the right amount of poo particles on my phone screen to give myself a healthy dose of pink-eye (makes me look like a pirate, pirates are fucking cool.)  Normally, I’d get my pink-eye via anal sex and eating ass, but it’s been a slow few months.

After a particularly vigorous swipe (on my phone, you fuck, I wipe very gently using two-ply in a front-to-back motion) to evolve my Brontosaurus, my phone slipped out.  It fell to the cracked linoleum floor, all cinematic and shit like slow motion you know?  Brand new fucking phone that I traded some sweaters for.  Just fuckin’ cracking like that, resting amidst the shattered pieces of dead insects and pizza crust.  I saw red.  I saw blue.  

I saw the fucking future right then motherlicker.

Somehow, through some kind of ocular shift, my focus changed.  The cell phone blurred and something closer became apparent, something that had been sitting nestled up in my ass-crack for at least as long as my hemorrhoids have been active.  On the tag, on the fucking tag of my underpants.  The truth has been right there, I’ve been sharting on the fucking truth all along.

Just below the name of the serf state where the garment was made is a warning, bright red, all capitals: KEEP AWAY FROM FIRE.

But do they mean that I should not go near fires? Do they mean I should not put my underpants near fires (either while wearing, or not wearing, them?) Are my underpants making some kind of existential mythic commentary about the Prometheus myth and the progress of civilization, and through the stupidity of warning me about the dangers of fire via the tag on my underpants, are they actually making a commentary about the decline of civilization (because if you need a warning on your fucking underpants to keep them away from fires, you probably aren't going to survive.)

Well FUCK YOU boxer briefs, YOU ARE NOT THE BOSS OF ME.  The truth, you ahistorical fucks, is always revealed in rebellion against control.

I went through my underpants drawer and collected them all, all of them, except for those black ones I got in Ireland that have glow-in-the-dark eyes and glow-in-the-dark beer-froth on them, they’re ratty but cool and—memories, nostalgia, you know?  The rest of them I rounded up in handfuls and tossed into a garbage bag.  Grabbed a few socks along the way, I’ll admit it, it’s possible, but fuck it—socks are like the underpants of the feet.  Really, if you think about it, socks are worse than underpants: they smell worse inherently, and if you think feet don’t shart you are wrong my friend.  Toe jam.  You ever smell your fucking toenails after you clip ‘em? That stuff is down there, mushin’ around allllll dayyyyyy lonnnnnngggggg.

Sacrifices have to be made for true freedom, true comfort, to create the genital world that we all desire.

It was night.. I drove out to my friend’s grandparent’s farm, it was a long trip.  Three hours by car, a half hour ferry, and another ten minutes to the field.  It’s mid-August, so the barn has just been cleaned, all the sheep shit piled in small mountains, looming before me in the grim light of the bloodmoon.  No, before you ask: this will not be some romantic tale of underpants burned amidst flammable manure.  Yeah, manure IS flammable, but only when dried out you fuck.  Wet sloppy crap is still wet.

No, I dumped my underpants and three odd socks on a pile, the mountains of excrement watching on like silent guardians.  I made a circle of rocks around the pile, some real arcane cultic shit you know.  I added some straw, a few pieces of brush and wood from nearby.  And then I lit that fucking 100% cotton up my dude.

And I laughed.

Flame billowed from the boxers and the few lonely foot-gloves, indigo and emerald and pumpkin coloured, the garments gave off a simultaneously saccharine and mephitic odour like a raccoon corpse whose final shit consisted of a sea urchin’s partially digested gonads.

But those flames, those are the righteous flames of freedom.  As my panties burned, a breeze blew past and my aggressive ass hair brushed––just grazed, just nice––against my jeans.  And then I knew true freedom.  Then I knew the truth.  Yeah, whatever, that guy Nathan in undergrad argued against this those many years ago.   And now he’s got a law degree and thinks he knows about justice.  So what if the point of the underpant is to provide a boundary zone between the booty-sweat and the pant, to avoid the build-up of unwanted bacterium in the money zone.  I am executing my fucking rights to go commando, as hinted at in the Constitution of the United States of America and as demanded by the oppressive warning on my boxers so startlingly revealed to me as my ass hovered over the toilet bowl.  True freedom is burning your fucking underpants alive in a field of manure piles beneath the moonlight so that you have one less layer of garment prison around your shitty body as you slowly rot through life.